


The rest is silence

by aryastark_valarmorghulis



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Lost Years, M/M, Past Drug Use, Past Love, Post-First War with Voldemort, Reminiscing, Sirius Black in Azkaban
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-09 15:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19478698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aryastark_valarmorghulis/pseuds/aryastark_valarmorghulis
Summary: Remus Lupin, somewhere in Devonshire in the early eighties.





	The rest is silence

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to my darling [shessocold](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shessocold/pseuds/shessocold) and to [TheHufflebean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SevralShips/pseuds/TheHufflebean) for the awesome beta job!  
> The lovely [mmsart](https://mmsart.tumblr.com/) drew a wonderful piece of [art](https://mmsart.tumblr.com/post/186678071324/quite-the-pathetic-picture-an-abandoned-garden) inspired by this story. Thank you very much, from the bottom of my heart!  
> Warnings: mentions of past drug use.

The earthy smell of loose soil soars out of the loam, a verdant, bracing anticipation of fresh things, of nature made anew.

Remus pulls a tussock from the flowerbed and tosses it aside, a grasshopper fluttering at the periphery of his eyes. It’s the strangest thing, returning to the countryside, the wizarding side of the country, actually.

Here, time flows at its own slow pace, sometimes distilled until it’s a freeze frame, the end of a play where all the main characters are dead and the only one left alive is the sidekick. The story is already over and wrapped up, heroes dead, enemies defeated, so it’s not important where and how the sidekick ends up; the aftermath is not worth showing. The hint that he’ll be living a miserable, lonely existence is enough for the audience – nobody wants to watch that. But one has to live it.

London spat Remus out of her dark, crowded bowels of shady Muggle bars, out of the nights spent cottaging and looking for crack in dirty public toilets before waking up on some stranger’s couch or floor, feeling like his skull cap just fell out and all the memories with it. But then, one morning he had been in Knockturn Alley to purchase Dittany after a bad full moon, and he had picked up a discarded Prophet and found Mrs O’Brien’s ad in the jobs section.

After all, nihilism had always suited Sirius better than it does Remus, who wears it like an ill-fitting robe, his survival instinct always lurking in ambush, a basal urge his bones are imbued with, a driving force not unlike the pull of the sickle moon.

So here he is, in the delightfully pastoral Devonshire countryside, playing the respectable caretaker, with a bit of gardening on the side. It shouldn’t be the right moment of the year to plant – too late – but it will be with a cheap but effective fertilizer of dried Kelp and Plimpy Eyes he purchased with his first salary.

In time, tightly folded petals will be swelling in their greenish casings, ready to bloom into bluebells, crocus and daffodils. Not every bud would blossom, but a lot of them will, so Remus might as well fool himself and believe he did something useful, this time. It hasn’t happened much, in the last months. Or years. Or lifetime.

He hoists himself up with a grunting crack of knee joints.

For maximum effectiveness, he should have sprinkled the soil with Dragon Dung, but of course Remus doesn’t have enough Galleons to afford it, not after he secured himself with enough Dittany to last him the next four months. Very reformed of him, to have resold the drugs he’d bought, to have vowed not to use them again, and to invest his money instead on healing herbs. It isn’t the first time Remus has attempted to sober up, but maybe it will be the last.

Remus wipes at his sweaty forehead and takes off his flat cap – a Christmas present from his father of which he’s fond even if it’s terribly out of fashion, or maybe even because it is, in that tender way one can be fond of old, ugly things out of affection for those who gave them as gifts. Like the yellow socks that lie, unworn, at the bottom of his trunk, or the picture frame – no, he won’t venture into _that._ He still has work to do and for the sake of at least trying to stay clean, he shoves any thoughts of Peter and _Sirius_ in the dark corner of his mind where he caches the unthinkable, truths and lies and loves.

Looking around, he spots weeds growing thick inside the flowerbeds that surround the little pond and the empty fountain; of course, the drawback of dried Kelp and Plimpy Eyes is that the fertilizer will indiscriminately make everything grow stronger, not just the flowers.

Remus picks up a pointy piece of wood from the toolbox he found in the shed and walks by the pond, kneeling again to shred the plantain weeds, one by one, until there’s a free space around every sprout. Then, he does the same around the fountain and, despite the overcast sky, he has to roll his old flannel’s sleeves up to the elbows.

He spends what remains of the afternoon planting new buds here and there, repeating to himself that this must be some sort of atonement for the general string of self-destructiveness that led him from 1981 to the present day. In a moment of sweaty fatigue, he even believes it a little. Some things make sense only in novels, really.

He could have managed more quickly with his wand, of course, but Mrs O’Brien recommended him to be wary of the Muggle kids that sometimes climb the small iron gate to play hide and seek in the park.

If Remus is honest, he might risk it; he never saw those infamous naughty children. Besides, Mrs O’Brien’s first warning had been to guard the perimeter and chase away the Muggle druggies that break in at night, and on his way to work he heard a couple of mothers, yelling at their kids not to play in the park, their voices muffled by the painted half-open shutters of their nice-looking cottages.

The little park will become beautiful in spring, oaks, cypresses, and brown earth promising to Remus that they would wake up soon, like old friends that communicate with him in the ancient language of nature. But Remus doubts he’ll last that long; none of his jobs spans more than four months, and he’s already past the first month. Muggle bosses tend to grow weary of his monthly absences and his shabby appearance, whereas wizarding employers shoot looks of masked or blatant disgust before throwing him out.

Mrs O'Brien – a rich Squib and therefore fairly different from his previous employers – seems less than thrilled about his defections, but so far no more than mildly curious about Remus’ nondescript health problems.

He had decided that, if she chooses to sack him, he won’t resort to Obliviating or Confunding her to change her mind; after all, he already Charmed his false references, selling himself as an expert caretaker.

He always does that. In his long and varied resume, "caretaker" was never featured before. It’s kind of an oxymoron, because taking care of things – or people, is far from his strongest suit. He is, however, an excellent liar and an outcast, a stray – once it was almost funny to put it this way, but not anymore – so hiding in a tower of ashes for as long as the job lasts is not actually an issue. It’s one of the best places he’s ever lived in.

Dirty hands wiped on his patched corduroys, Remus decides to head back inside; sunlight is dwindling, anyway, and he has done a lot today.

He tries to picture the surprised expression on the faces of all the townspeople who, in the coming spring, will see flowers and green grass on that usually barren soil, but then he remembers that nobody ever comes here except for elusive druggies or the occasional rebellious kid, so flowers and shrubs will be born and dead without a soul to notice it or care.

What is before his eyes at the moment takes over: a deserted park with a dilapidated stone wall carpeted with ivy vines, bare narrow paths flanked with stark cypresses and old oaks, a garden full of unbloomed flowers, a cracked dry fountain.

Quite the pathetic picture, an abandoned garden, and a lonely creature walking in the declining light of dusk.

Checking around, merely out of habit, Remus takes his wand out of the pocket and murmurs the usual incantations. _Protego totalum, Repello Babbanum, Salvio Hexia._

Mrs O’Brien never told him explicitly to cast magic to guard the place, but she also didn’t say not to use it, so that’s what he does at night, when he turns in. All familiar, well practised spells, that he can cast mindlessly, the routine of protecting himself against an enemy that by now is nothing but a phantom limb.

With a last glance, Remus opens the small iron gate and then closes it behind him, and it gives a groaning accompaniment of rust and disuse.

Just outside, his gaze skims by the dead oak across the street, its sad bare branches and knobbly roots jutting out from the footpath: it reminds him of the Whomping Willow, even if it doesn’t look at all like the Willow, not in the slightest. Memory always casts its unfathomable spell, linking innocuous details and plaguing them with the pain of remembrance.

The downside of sobriety, he reckons, is that he can’t hide behind a vacant, blurry-edged, mindless daze. The past surfaces like it’s been hastily buried by a sandstorm, within reach, almost a semi-tangible ghost breathing a chilly draft over his neck.

It is like that whenever Remus dutifully Apparates to the Ministry basement an hour before the full moon, the same faces and glances of _before,_ the usual remarks hissed through gritted teeth about a _tamed werewolf_.

It’s in the men and women he seeks for a temporary relief from loneliness, his mind reshaping all their faces into a sharp jaw, angular features, grey eyes, and black hair. Even trying to banish any thought of Sirius is acknowledging the enormity of his absence, a black hole swallowing the present.

He didn’t think it was possible to build a life around absences, but it is, the present flimsy and opaque with loneliness, devoid of meaning.

This is the coda, the few minutes left before nightfall, the brief aftermath after Hamlet’s death, and Remus is a Horatio without anyone to pass the story on to.

He seeks the transparent moon without wanting to, as if the scythe half-face in the bluish sky just reached out to hook a cold finger under his chin, muscles and joints pulled taut from fatigue, shivering in the crispness of the almost night, feeling every rounded cobble under the too-thin soles of his boots.

Remus’ little tower is on a gently sloped hill, a few meters at left to the park, a magic building invisible to Muggles, probably an old summer residence of some rich wizarding family gutted after the Grindelwald war and never rebuilt. Only a small turret stands, a beaten up survivor, less than seven meters, colourless grey stone, slightly lopsided. Remus bizarrely thinks it fits him better, somehow, than the shitty flat he shared with – it’s been a good day, today. He only thought about Sirius nine or ten times.

Up close, the bricks look their ancient age, eroded and chipped, the spells that bound them together for centuries bending under the weight of time. On days when the wind blows mercilessly, a cloud of ashes flings off from the tower like a flock of dirt.

More than once he mulled over the idea of tinkering with magic to fix it, but in the end, he never does it. It’s just a temporary lodging until Mrs O’Brien grows tired of him, and it has its derelict charm. 

As soon as he crosses the threshold, he goes up the narrow winding staircase to step into his room – also the only inhabitable room, and with a distracted flick of his wand, he sends the kettle flying over a portable stove.

The room is quite big for Remus’ standards but fairly dark, even after he conjures up a bunch of floating candles. There is plaster is coming off the bare walls in flakes, a single mattress shoved up against the wall just under the pointed window, a wobbly three-legged table, and a creaky wicker chair.

His only belongings are the extendable suitcase – with its meagre contents – the books scattered on the floor, and a wireless.

The arched window offers a very good view of the park, silent and wrapped up in long shadows. If Remus looks further away, he can glimpse the city lights, glittering like fireflies, and he imagines people busy with their ordinary chores, setting up the table, arguing about dishes, throwing tantrums over vegetables, worrying about money, chattering about the news on the telly. This must be what James and Lily wanted, what Peter never had the chance to have. What he and – no reason to delve there. The very thought of him is fearsome like the Bogeyman his mum told him about before tucking him to bed, a bad spirit ready to snatch him if he didn’t behave.

Remus is behaving. Trying, at the very least. He has a tower of ashes, and it’s more than most people have.

He’s lucky. 

**Author's Note:**

> "The rest is silence" are the last words of Hamlet in Shakespeare's play.  
> Come say hi on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/aryastark-valarmorghulis)!  
> 


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